arXiv:2608. 02538v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper is concerned with one-bit mean estimation, where each independent sample is represented by a single binary message.
arXiv:2610. 10488v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the best arm identification problem in a stochastic environment with a novel form of adversarial perturbations, which we coin Shifting Means.
The paper investigates Bayesian fixed‑confidence best‑arm identification where a learner may abstain from a final recommendation. It introduces the Screen‑and‑Confirm (S&C) algorithm, analyzes its expected stopping time, and derives lower bounds for any algorithm under error probability δ and abstention budget α constraints. For Gaussian priors, the authors provide matching upper and lower bounds, characterize exact constants for practical regimes, and show that S&C achieves optimal α–dependent rates, improving on previous results when abstention is disallowed.
arXiv:2609. 08564v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study distributed one-dimensional mean estimation under a 1-bit communication constraint.
arXiv:2607. 11635v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In fixed-budget best-arm identification, also known as ranking and selection, an algorithm has a sampling budget to distribute across $K$ arms.
arXiv:2607. 02896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We ask whether interaction is necessary for order-optimal 1-bit mean estimation over nonparametric finite-moment classes.
The paper revisits the Successive Rejects (SR) algorithm for best‑arm identification, showing that although SR appears non‑adaptive due to fixed phase lengths, it achieves an optimal worst‑instance error exponent for Gaussian arms with common variance. The authors formulate an optimization problem to design a phase schedule that maximizes the normalized error exponent, leading to a new variant called H1‑balanced Successive Rejects (H1‑SR). H1‑SR attains at least 11/12 of the optimal normalized rate for all K ≥ 2, approaching the optimum as K grows, and experiments demonstrate significant performance gains over the original SR while highlighting trade‑offs in early elimination strategies.
We study distributed one-dimensional mean estimation under a 1-bit communication constraint. Each agent observes one sample, drawn independently from an unknown distribution, and returns a single bit in response to a query $Q: \mathbb{R}\to\{0,1\}$ chosen by a central learner.
arXiv:2409. 18909v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by real-world applications that necessitate responsible experimentation, we introduce the problem of best arm identification (BAI) with minimal regret.
arXiv:2610.01951v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Top-two algorithms are simple and effective for fixed-confidence best-arm identification, but their sharp non-asymptotic behavior is still not well u...
arXiv:2610.16840v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world systems often serve many objectives but can deploy only a few options, whose performance must be learned from noisy feedback. Modeling eac...
arXiv:2602. 03972v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The best-arm identification (BAI) problem is one of the most fundamental problems in interactive machine learning, which has two flavors: the fixed-budget setting (FB) and the fixed-confidence setting (FC).